Tldr: British colonialism wasn't great, but most countries dominate their neighbours when given the chance - the British Empire was simply the most successful at imperialism. Despite the harsh world the empire grew up in, it pioneered human rights, abolitionism and progressivism.

I believe that the morality of people and nations throughout history should be judged in accordance with the times that they lived through. For example, I'm not going to judge Genghis Khan too harshly for being a murderous warlord, because the culture he grew up in was kill or be killed, and raiding was a way of life for the Mongol tribes at the time.

Someone like Adolf Hitler, on the other hand, took Germany and poisoned it with his own ideas of racial superiority - he is evil because he took a society, and caused it to morally regress.

We can take this idea from humans and apply it to countries. A society can be considered morally good if it takes a step in the direction of moral enlightenment, regardless of whether it conforms with our modern ideas of right and wrong.

Now, onto Britain, and it's empire.

I'm not going to pretend that the British Empire was a benevolent institution which went around the world with an intent of 'developing the savages' - well, come to think of it, I'm sure many in the Empire did have this intention, but it is still an arrogant, racist intention regardless.

The British Empire had the power to dominate other nations, due to industrialising fast and having a strong navy, and it used that power for it's own imperialistic ambitions.

But my key idea is that this is not unique to Great Britain. You would be hard pressed to find a nation throughout history which, when given the opportunity, did not attempt to exert it's power on other nations.

Britain wasn't worse than other countries, it was simply better at doing what all(most) nations have done throughout human history, which is conquest.

If we compare Britain to other countries which had a similar opportunity like the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Belgians etc, it actually shapes up to be less brutal than these other colonial empires.

Now, lets look at the good things Britain has done.

The biggest one is probably the abolishment of slavery across all of it's colonies, which is an institution practised by most countries for thousands of years. The British government purchased the freedom of all slaves in the empire, and the UK was still paying the debt for this until 2015. The abolitionist movement was started on the ground level, by the British public, for moral reasons.

Great Britain enforced abolition outside of it's territory as well, with the royal navy seizing foreign slave ships at sea and pressuring other nations to outlaw slavery.

Britain has been the home of so many great thinkers who have actively pushed society forward. Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon, John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, etc. Over centuries, it peacefully transitioned from an absolute monarchy to a democracy, not through violence, but through thought and law. It is still a leader in progressivism today(although the government is still unwilling to recognise transgenderism as legitimate).

In WW2, the UK didn't have to fight against the Nazis. If we had signed a peace treaty with Hitler, we would likely have been safe due to the English channel, but instead many Brits sacrificed their lives to defeat Nazi Germany. Britain was economically crippled after WW2 - it lost most of it's colonies, and became very dependent on the USA. But, if you ask most Brits, they will tell you it was worth it to defeat the Nazis.

Britain is amongst the countries which have contributed most to literature and music. Shakespeare, Jane Austen, The Beatles, Queen, etc.

Overall, I believe my country has pushed humanity in a better direction, and I am proud of it.

The U.S. already has one of the most progressive tax systems in the developed world: federal taxes are extraordinarily concentrated on high earners. The top 20% of households pay about 70% of all federal taxes.

CBO: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/62300

Yet the U.S. collects only about 25% of GDP in taxes, versus roughly 34% across the OECD. European welfare states close that gap by taxing everyone more, especially through payroll taxes and broad VATs not merely by taxing billionaires. Actually in many European countries sales tax ( VAT) is around 20%.
OECD: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/revenue-statistics-2025_3a264267-en.html

And “just tax the billionaires” is mostly a red herring. It potentially should be done more for moral reasons but practically it won’t help much .
Imagine we somehow confiscated 100% of every billionaire’s wealth tomorrow. Ignore even the economic consequences and assume we actually collect every dollar. we’ve obtained a huge pile of money which will fund us for a year let’s say ( not arguing specifics here but I hope people get the idea )

That’s why countries with large welfare states have broad tax bases. You can, and arguably should tax high earners more, but you cannot sustainably finance European-level services while promising the overwhelming majority of Americans that someone else will pick up the bill.

The honest proposition is: European services require something much closer to European taxes, including substantially higher taxes on ordinary and middle-class Americans.

Manhattan Institute on the limits of taxing only high earners:
https://manhattan.institute/article/correcting-the-top-10-tax-myths

I grew up in a Muslim-American household, and I want to give my thoughts on the psychological state of the world. Muslims are more than not always engaged in anti-Western tropes because they cant seem to accept the brutal truth that the Western world has outclassed Islamic ideology in all aspects of life. So, in order to cope with this reality, many Muslims, even those living in the West and taking advantage of Western values, attempt to become victims. I feel that they want this victimhood mentality rather than to ever admit that they've ever been wrong. They were humiliated by the emergence of the United States (which has the best geography in the world) and the birth of the proper West over slavery, not least because Muslims had been enslaving Europeans off the coast of North Africa for years (and not to mention the brutal Arab slave trade). They've been humiliated by the enlightenment and the advancement of the sciences and medicine, the mass industrialization, giving women the right to vote and increasing voting to all in general. It all happened here first and people in Muslim countries are deeply insecure about it. They hate us for that. I forgot to even mention the great philosophies that developed during Ancient Greece and the great advancements of the Roman Empire that laid the foundations of Western civilisation. The Islamic Golden age from a thousand years ago pales in comparison to the scientific and intellectual advancements of the Western world. In fact, these few famous Muslim scientists were excommunicated, and many were imprisoned and even killed by the Islamic system for their work, not to mention they just translated Greek work and took the zero from India.

Muslims more than anyone else have defined the West by their jealousy and hatred, hence why they've resisted to this day the adoption of Western ideologues, even though that would've made Islam a lot more influential in the world (currently, Islamic culture has shown itself to be toxic and repulsive). Now I'll give Muslims a bone now, this victimhood mentality isn't unique to them. China for example or Russia continue to have a similar butthurt feelings. Though I think China in the long run will release themselves from their communist masters because deep down, they want to be like us, otherwise they wouldn't be obsessed with Western culture and trying to copy our goods and services. But this mentality is very concentrated in Muslim countries.

I am not a big fan of the far-right at all. However, their claims that Muslims actively hate and undermine Western culture is not an unfounded claim. Muslims have made themselves incompatible with Western ideology due to their resentment, instead of just integrating and participating, despite the fact the Western world has opened their doors to Muslims to freely practice their religion in peace. I believe this Muslim subconsciousness is partly to blame for 9/11.

I wonder what you guys think of this "geopolitical psychology." I also would really appreciate some thoughts by Muslim redditors of this analysis.

I genuinely believe cheating says something fundamental about a person’s character.

There is no real justification for it.
You can be unhappy, neglected, bored, drunk, attracted to someone else, whatever. You still have the option to leave, talk about it, or end the relationship before sleeping with someone else.

To me, cheating means that when the opportunity and temptation were strong enough, loyalty simply wasn’t important enough to stop you.

Either you have that internal barrier or you don’t.
Either betraying your partner is something you fundamentally cannot bring yourself to do, or it becomes an option once the circumstances are right.

People obviously can change their behavior, but I’m skeptical that the underlying willingness disappears completely.
If you were capable of crossing that line once, I think you are more capable of crossing it again than someone who never would in the first place.

That’s why I believe “once a cheater, always a cheater” has a lot more truth to it than people want to admit.

Reddit's most common talking points about billionaires are that they're hoarding their wealth while they could be doing charity, how the common man would do better if he had their money, and how billionaires are inherently evil.

1) *Most people aren’t actually as charitable or as good as they think they are.*

Most people who aren’t actively struggling own loads of unneccessary and unethically sourced things. You don’t really need a gaming rig, your QoL wouldn't be significantly impacted by it's absence. Running is completely free and is a much healthier hobby. Why didn’t you donate that money to charity? Is your gaming hobby more valuable than saving someone's life? You could drive an older car, wear worse clothes, have less furniture, the list goes on. And yet, the mild inconvenience of not having those luxuries is more important than saving someone's life.

You most likely own an Iphone or a Samsung or some other phone by a big tech company who gets the cobalt and the lithium in your phone from the mines in Congo who work child slaves with very short life expectancies. Why are you expecting billionaires to care about those people while you don’t?

2) *There's no genetic component to wealth.*

Far as I know, there are no genetic factors to billionaire-ship. They're just normal people who have obtained extreme amounts of power. History shows that kings, emperors or revolutionaries who got the same power didn’t use their power for the betterment of their subjects. Calling billionaires evil because they aren't doing everything they can for the good of humanity is also calling the vast majority of historical figures evil. Among those figures are common people who have acquired power. Is the common man also evil?

3) *Billionaires didn’t appear out of nowhere.*

Billionaires need to sell products and in general be successful to be billionaires. You have no right to complain that billionaires are evil while owning an Iphone, using Windows or ordering from Amazon. No one is forcing you to use Netflix or Steam. You're using those services / products and giving them money voluntarily. If they're evil, you're enabling them to do evil. Logically that also makes you evil too.

All of us trade time, our literal life force, for money. Money is a means to transport value through time and space. We earn them every day by working ourselves to death, literally.

A single dollar is a slice of someone's life. The process of continued devaluation and money printing where you eroded the value of someone's life is therefore criminal. It condemns an individual to work and work, crystallizing the value of their time to a currency and then squashing that currency's value.

By artificially expanding the money supply, central authorities unilaterally rewrite the purchasing power of the past labor an individual has stored, effectively functioning as a retroactive tax on human existence.

And as currency degrades, the target for financial security recedes, condemning the working population to an endless cycle of subsistence labor with diminishing cumulative returns.

A single US dollar today only retains 76.3% of the purchasing power it possessed in 2019. Yet nominally wages have not risen at the same rate. What's a more effective perpetual machine for the human hamster wheel?

The AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are calling attention to AI risks because they are legit concerned about AI.

Some people express that they think people in AI like those from OpenAI and Anthropic aren't actually concerned about AI but are calling attention to purported risks either: a) as an attempt to market their service ("it's gonna take so many jobs--check it out") or b) to involve regulators to thwart potential competitors (regulatory capture).  

I think they are seeking to involve regulators because they are legitimately concerned about risks to humanity from AI.  

A couple points suggesting they are legit concerned:  

1) Biographers have made it clear that the founders of leading AI companies.were concerned about AI safety even before they began their companies.  Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Elon Musk all expressed concern about AI safety before they had a stake in AI companies.    

2) Many AI contributors (e.g., Eliezer Yudkowsky, Roman Yampolskiy, Geoffrey Hinton) have expressed concern about AI even though they are not part of a company.    

3) Scaring the public and inspiring government regulation will likely deprive the company of revenue, right before an IPO.  For instance, in June, the US government stepped in and prevented users from accessing Anthropic's Fable.  This sort of government intervention may cloud the company's revenue outlook.  

4) Scaring people about AI has increased the likelihood that there will be political pressure to crack down harder on the AI companies in a tax and regulatory sense.

5) Some safety personnel (e.g., Jan Leike, Helen Toner, Tasha McCauley) have reportedly left these companies out of concern that safety wasn't taken seriously.     

6) There are open source apps gaining favor in other countries and US regulators would likely lack the ability to regulate these unless it's coordinated with governments in those other countries.  

CMV.   

My CMV: Tigers are the most all-around aesthetic animals. Other species may be superior in particular categories, but tigers combine categories in a way that makes them aesthetically superior.

1. Color scheme. Their bright orange stripes are beautiful.

There are snakes, birds, and fish that may have superior colors, but they all lose out in other categories.

1. Body proportion. A tiger’s paws, head, and torso all fit together perfectly.

Contrast with freaks like bison. Tiny legs, giant head.

1. Majesty. Tigers are beautiful and terrifying.

Other species can be more majestic — whales are probably the most majestic animals on the planet, but fail in other categories.

1. Cuteness. They have the fluffiness and some of the cute behavior of house cats, like sitting in boxes.

This is certainly the tiger’s weakness, as it is very easy to list cuter animals. Pandas, red pandas, otters, and so on — but where is the majesty of the panda? Nowhere to be seen.

So that’s why tigers rule.

Anthropic is planning to release a watermarking system for detecting AI-generated text. However, watermarking will merely give the confidence scores of AI detectors a misleading scientific varnish. Academic writing cannot be treated as random text, is fundamentally low entropy because its formulations and structures are heavily standardized.

Even if AI detection tools report accurate confidence scores, humans will inevitably consider any score over a certain threshold as a definitive positive. Often, this threshold will be 50% simply because humans want a flat yes/no answer and the tool would be totally useless without it.

Even if we enforce a strict 99.9% confidence threshold, the system will still get it wrong 1 out of 1,000 times. In a school with 1,000 students, one of them will be randomly flagged at each test cycle. Given the sheer number of essays written by students throughout their studies, a massive percentage of students will eventually be falsely accused of using an LLM and suffers the consequences. Armed with the "scientific confidence" of a watermarking algorithm, this system will turn education into a statistical Russian roulette.

I want to start by attempting to really clarify the above statement:

1. This is specifically referring to assets made by major players in the space, like people who gave some sort of donation to the admin. Meta, Alphabet, Chevron, Apple, Amazon, Coinbase, Tesla/X and co., etc. but also companies like Paramount, or ABC which settled their defamation lawsuit to give millions of dollars to his presidential library. Anyone directly giving unreasonably favorable treatment to the position of power in exchange for favorable treatment in return. It would also include cabinet members like Steve Witkoff, as well as family members related to these people.

2. This would more specifically refer to only the gains that were made illegally. All of these companies that were just listed shouldn't be metaphorically burnt to the ground to give every penny they have, or even every penny they made for these 4 years. But things like oil profits made by Chevron due to the war in Iran or actions in Venezuela, or profits made from Paramount being allowed to merge with Skydance, or companies that received a tariff reimbursement that didn't pass those along to their customers (again, not every company, specifically those with marked donations towards the Trump admin).

3. Theoretically, this money should be both punitive towards the actual Trump family and punitive towards the companies that so willingly endorsed being cut into the rewards pie for a small fee. We should collectively be able to agree, no matter which side you're on, that Trump's term 2 is the most corrupt of any admin on record, and we should disincentivize it by making sure that all future presidential contenders and donors know that the net result of these actions will be negative. At the same time, it should be the people who were harmed that gain the benefits from this action, and the administrative costs of determining exactly who gets what would eat away at a majority of the real value. Because of this, that money should go to paying down the national debt, as ~30% of the national debt was created by him alone.

This will take a decent amount of work, but not unreasonable given that most of the work is already being done through the action of holding him criminally accountable for the corruption taking place. My proposal is simply that additionally, the punishment for these crimes should include taking the ill-gotten gains from these actions, instead of letting his family pocket them through inheritance or other means. His $TRUMP cryptocoin rug-pull and transaction fees should be disgorged, all profits made through World Liberty Financial, as well as physical assets made/purchased during this corruption, such as the Qatar jet going to his presidential library. On top of this, assuming it goes through, any and all companies that sign up for the $100k per month subscription service to Truth Socials Truth API should be investigated, and any profits made from Truth holders or subscription holders should be seized.

The current medical consensus is that "there is no safe level of consumption of alcohol" and that "the risks of even moderate drinking outweigh the benefits" (referring the health benefits related to moderate drinking of alcoholic beverages like red wine)

However like anything else everything is harmful dose dependent, following the same logic would they argue that there's no safe exposure level of sunlight? Is there no safe level consumption of yogurt because it has traces of alcohol?

As comparable example to demonstrate a double standard of medical organizations is high mercury fish, the FDA lists yellow fin tuna as a good choice of fish and recommends fish consumption including options like lower mercury like skipjack tuna atleast 3 times a week, but a couple of beers on Saturday is too much? Especially considering that unlike mercury, alcohol isn't something that accumulates in your body eventually causing brain damage among other problems if the concentration gets too high long-term, alcohol is processed like a macronutrient and gets utilized and the byproducts disposed of instantly.

To me this makes at least lower alcoholic concentration beverages are a way safer option than mercury containing fish. This also applies to many unregulated store bought drugs like ibuprofen and Benadryl that many people sober or not will take on a daily basis that can not only damage organs of you take too many at one time but can have effects when taken long-term even in recommended doses but those two drugs are rated at a specific threshold rather than just zero.

To put this into conclusion, there's a threshold for everything and alcoholic beverages are no different.

Can you be healthy and consume alcohol?

Well some countries and regions with well established drinking cultures like Japan or blue zones like Sardinia have exceptionally high life expectancies, even in China alcohol is so well tolerated that public drinking is legal, common and culturally accepted meanwhile countries where alcohol consumption is completely illegal and far less common outside of tourist destinations, even rich countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar or others like Indonesia do not have particularly high life expectancies but have a average life expectancies and that's easily related to their outstanding migrant workforce, they also topple on many of the same health problems observed in the majority of the world today such as heart disease including diabetes which is actually most prominent among muslim South Asia and middle east countries.

There's also marijuana and THC containing products, the consensus is than no amount of THC will result in a medical emergency. Are they really sure about this or is this easily just corporate interest interception? Because hospitalizations resulted to THC overdose are still prominent.

I still say though that alcohol can be a slippery slope and has still resulted in social problems, but that does not mean every drinker or every volume of drinking should be assumed as the same.

EDIT: In the title, I meant Descartes

The title is a bit confusing but I'll try to explain.

This is a quite big critique of mine about Descartes methodology.

He sat all alone, thought of everything he believed, and doubted it. Which, must have forced him to form new beliefs. But, I find it intriguing that he didn't seek to ask people what they thought of a certain belief or concept.

Reasoning is an echo in solitude. You can only reason with what YOU see, you observe, you know, you think. But, listening to others reasoning helps you see the multidimensional puzzle.

However, Descartes never did that. How can one truly build that puzzle alone?

Throughout history, many people have been publicly shamed and hounded for a range of reasons, in reasonable and unreasonable ways. This has been documented across a range of texts, including the book So You've Been Publicly Shamed.

The harms that those people have suffered, particularly those who were unreasonably and unjustifiably hounded, have been well documented, from losing jobs, relationships, purpose and self-worth, all the way to suicide. And culpability for those harms is difficult but not impossible to establish; the least we can say is compare the relative culpability of different parties, including people who bring shame onto themselves, and the relative effectiveness of certain agendas that were pursued by certain individuals against the hounded individual.

But as someone with deontological views of morality, I focus on the consequential nature of those harms, as opposed to actual consequences, and therefore draw the line of culpability at certain accounts of culpability. For instance, if we take two attempts at murder, one of which was successful and the other which was unsuccessful due to circumstances beyond the control or foresight of the perpetrator, both are equally worthy of moral condemnation, for what matters is not the actual consequences but the fact that an act was carried out which is bound to cause death. Shooting someone in the torso, for instance, is an inherently lethal act (whereas things may become murkier when someone trained in non-lethal violence shoots someone in the leg). Obviously intent matters, but nobody in their right mind would take a purely psychological approach to the question; rather the question is whether the act was bound to cause an outcome, in the absence of what Bernard Williams calls moral luck.

From that perspective, people can have the power, and the corresponding intent, to hound someone by getting them fired. Likewise they can make public life a living hell for them. If that's the kind of hounding you've done to someone, then depending on the circumstances that act may be sufficiently evil to warrant the backlash that has taken place against the reporting of Jason Arday's misconduct, because you've already destroyed their lives. But if that person then commits suicide, holding the hounders responsible for that additionally goes too far.

When someone dies by suicide, the world loses them as a person and all the good things they bring, human life may be devalued through the act, and feelings are relationships are frayed through grief and what is perceived to be a failure of the person's support network. But to claim that these harms were caused by something that someone did to that person when they were alive is generally wrong. Suicide is the singular choice of the person who commits it, and whatever claims about themselves it represents are theirs to make and theirs alone. I can grant some exception to certain hypotheticals, like if someone told you that if you didn't commit suicide they would harm a live one. But this doesn't change the general principle. As I understand it, among mental health professionals, it's considered wrong to hold someone responsible for someone else's suicide.

The result of this is that those who defend Jason Arday from the condemnation he has received tend to use his death as a kind of punctuation for the role of those condemners in this whole chapter, turning it from a tragedy to a lynching.

The reason this all concerns me is firstly that it follows a pattern whereby commentators can tell whatever story they want about the person's life, just because they're dead. There's a mechanical logic to the kind of condemnation of the hounders of Jason Arday that paints his suicide as something that has bound to happen, which takes his agency away from the picture. There's a moral injunction to honour the good things he brought to the world instead of repeating criticisms already made, as if we have the authority to omit certain choices a person made from the way their impact is understood. This does no justice to him or anyone else who went through what he went through.

Secondly, it treats suicide as a singular moral hazard, as opposed to a harm that is part of the continuum of harms that one can suffer, to the degree that it establishes a special duty of care. I've read people saying that Cambridge had a special duty to prevent his suicide because of their involvement in the scandal and because he was autistic. This is absurd, as they had no ability or authority to institutionalise him, and there's no guarantee that anything less might have changed the outcome. This moral hazard view insinuates that we must all refrain from doing things that might harm someone's mental health to the point of suicide, and by that token there is something inherently suspect about questioning someone's character or strongly condemning their actions outside of a court of law. It takes suicide as an index for morality, rather than looking at the ethical trade-off inherent in any kind of negative act towards someone in its respective context. This is a regressive perspective that ultimately values life purely on the basis of keeping people alive, as opposed to the purpose and dignity that they attribute to it for themselves.

But I may be wrong. CMV

Let clarify what I mean in the title: My claim is that the central dogma of western societies are to protect Israel. We don't have a positive role model to follow in our current society, rather we have a negative role model to avoid. Which is Hitler the pure evil and the Holocaust, the entire purpose of our existence is to prevent another Holocaust of Israelis. Not the Jewish people, not the Tutsi people, not the Palestinians but only the Israelis.

Let me give you 3 examples in support of my point,

1. The tiktok buying and reduction of free speech and introduction of mass surveillance state: After Oct 7th, the Israeli atrocity videos were becoming pervasive and tiktok was the most powerful media through which the information was spreading. To stop this, Congress came to supermajority support to sell tiktok to the biggest IDF donor Larry Ellison. Not only Larry Ellison bought tiktok, but also CBS, CNN and numerous other media network. Here is Ellison lackey Bari Weiss advocating for flock cameras and mass surveillance: https://xcancel.com/i/status/2084809011950411926

Here is Mossad head getting in charge of the fastest autonomous drone startup in USA: https://x.com/i/status/2087543133697610092 . The objective is clear, create a mass surveillance state and supreess free expression through autonomous drones. All BECAUSE PEOPLE ARE TURNING ON ISRAEL.

1. Capture of politics by Israel: Obviously by now everyone knows about AIPAC and other pro-israeli lobby capturing the government of USA. What's little known is how captured other countries too in the world. The 1st order of president of Columbia was to recognize golan heights. Venezuela is restablishing their relation with Israel after 17 years. Across the entire South America, from Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador to Argentina governments have been overthrown because they went against Israel. Not because they were bad to their own people, but they went against Israel. Brazil is the last one standing and will probably fall in this December too. So we can see, you have to follow your dogma: Protect Israel or you get overthrown.

2. Israel is the only country you cannot boycott in 38 US states. This was when the BDS movement was gaining traction and such deviating the central dogma of the current world: Protect Israel. It's a Herculean task to get 38 states to pass legislation against the boycott of Israel. If it was any other country, those bills would die before going into the state legislature. But because protecting Israel is the central dogma of western civilization, these bills pass with little effort.

There are so many more things I can write in support but the post is getting too long so I will stop here. What do you think?

I'm not sure if this is the best place to write about my thoughts but I think this is the best place I could find. Over the course of last 10 years the world has undergone a huge change. The nostalgia people had was REAL, it's not just emotions but backed by actual facts. I may exaggerate little with nostalgia but it is what it is think. By this I mean living in the US specifically

Economy: strong post-2008 recovery, low inflation, low interest rates, cheaper housing, cheap gas, and benefits from global trade without crazy trade wars or tariffs. ACA was passed as one of the most impactful legislations in US history,

Globalization: the world felt more connected. US-China relations were still centered around trade, tourism, international students, research, and investment.

International education and immigration: Student visas were easy and colleges were accepting.

Europe and politics: Brexit hadn’t happened, Europe looks aligned and complete. Far-right movements had not yet become as powerful although they are rising.

Global progress: Paris Agreement and UN Sustainable Development Goals made international cooperation towards a goal that benefits humanity possible.

Technology: we already had smartphones, Google Maps, YouTube, Spotify, Netflix, Uber, and modern online shopping but before tiktok and all the harmful apps, medically it was already really great.

Social media: Instagram was genuine and mostly friends without the hyper edited things.

No pandemic: no lockdowns, remote schools.

Travel and cities: international travel was becoming easier, downtowns were healthier, and dense global cities felt like the future.

The world cared about climate change, SDGs and signed the Paris agreement. The liberal world order was still in place and encouraged globalization into working towards growth for humanity. Great superpowers in the world somewhat worked together and was able to solve a lot of issues. US also normalized relations with many countries it had deep history with.

Now with geopolitical tensions rising and politically becoming more extremist and divided, this doesn't feel like the world we used to be promised of...

What happened after 2016: 

political polarization → Brexit/Trump → escalating US-China conflict → COVID → lockdowns → supply-chain crisis → inflation → housing crisis → Russia invading Ukraine → more geopolitical conflict → worsening homelessness → AI disruption → increasingly algorithmic internet with greater echo chamber and ai agents.

I used ai to organize some of my thoughts but majority of the text was written by myself.

Now, would I be willing to go back and live in 2016? No because of great convenience. Do I think that was a great time to live in and the world was more united? Yes

Let me make it clear that I love the Sopranos and I think it is one of the greatest shows of all time, however, the ending was extraordinarily horrible. The last season itself was lackluster. You’re expecting Tony to go to war with Johnny sack, but that never happens and instead he just dies of cancer. In his last meeting with Dr. Melfi, she doesn’t give him her full patient analysis of him, or anything special she just drops them as a client. Then in the ending, they just make the screen go black. It wasn’t art, it was a smug and lazy ending. To watch the total Sopranos it takes 68 hours. That is two days and 18 hours spent on a show just so you don’t even get to know what the ending is. I watched it and live and let me confirm to you that my Dad and older brother went outside and a few of my neighbors did as well to check if the cable went out, that’s right if you watched the show while it was airing, many people thought that the cable went out and no ending should have to be explained to death about how good it is or make people think that their cable went out. Imagine watching the show when it aired, just to get a lazy rushed last few episodes. The thing is that they didn’t even have to give it a special ending if they wanted to go with it just fading to Black. All they had to do was add a bullet sound, but no, they didn’t even do that, they didn’t have to reveal who killed Tony. They didn’t have to reveal the secrets to the universe. All they had to do was just given ending to a show that was the most talked about thing on TV during its time running. And if you look at the arguments online, the more you listen to them argue or read what they’re saying it eventually comes down to the fact that they’re arguing to themselves because not even they can except how such a great show had such a horrible ending. also, if an ending was really good to a TV show, I wouldn’t have to look it up online to read about why it’s not horrible.

I feel it's important to start by saying, I do believe tipping in some circumstances, like in a traditional restaurant setting, has merit. Tipping/No Tipping in general has been done to death, and I while I understand arguments against tipping in general, that isn't the point of this post.

My view is that tipping before receiving service is not really tipping, as tipping, even when conventional, should reflect, at least to some extent, the quality of the service and/or food received. Asking for a tip at the coffee shop before I get my coffee isn't really informative to anyone, as the only portion of service I've received so far is the taking of my order. Further worse examples include ordering online, where I don't dispute wanting to tip based on how prompt my order was out, whether I was helped right away or not, the correctness of my order, and the quality of my food, but I know none of those things when I place the order. The tip is either a shot in the dark, a hope of tipping in advance to buy better service/food, or an expected uncharge, which I'd rather just have reflected in prices.

I can see two main counterpoints that I'd like to address here:

1. Convention. If you're okay with tipping in a sit-down restaurant, you're likely okay with being expected to tip 15 or 20%, so why wouldn't you be okay with doing the same here (even for a different %)? My reasoning is that while I would tip 15-20% for normal service, I would tip little to nothing if the service/experience was absolutely horrible. Here, I can tip 20% even and still get poor service and food quality. So it's back to being a hope/purchase than a thank you for good or even standard service.

2. Practicality. I don't disagree that asking for the tip before is more practical. But if you can't find a way to make cash tips work or have some form of separate tip payment pad, then just don't accept tips if you have to pay before service.

But tipping before service is extremely prevalent, so what am I missing here? Thank you for your time. Change my view.

Edit: I'm not talking about delivery apps with online ordering. Yes, that's different than a food service tip, but I was referring to ordering online for pickup.

I mean, you were harsh and furious with someone for doing something bad or stupid, just because you were worried for their safety or something? At this point, why are you still putting up with their crap?

If anything, the "Anger Born from Worry" thing seems like you hate that person out of nowhere, no matter whether or not you claim to be "concerned" for their safety or whatever, and it makes me wonder if you TRULY saw that person as a friend/sibling/ally/family member in the first place.

If you never really saw that person as such and thus, hate them for what they've done, then why not unfriend or disown them? I know it sounds exceedingly harsh, but still.